A young graduate looks for work at a jobcentre in London. Photograph: UK Stock Images Ltd/Alamy

Every generation has its measure of outcasts. However, it doesn't happen often that the plight of being outcast may stretch to embrace a whole generation. Yet precisely that may be happening in Europe now.

After several decades of rising expectations, the present-day newcomers to adult life confront expectations falling – and much too steeply and abruptly for any hope of a gentle and safe descent. If there was bright light at the end of the tunnels their predecessors passed through, there is now a long, dark tunnel stretching behind every one of the few flickering, fast fading lights trying in vain to pierce through the gloom. With prospects of long-term unemployment and long stretches of "rubbish jobs" well below their skills and expectations, this is the first postwar generation facing the prospect of downward mobility.

The youngsters of the generation now entering the so-called "labour market" have been groomed and honed to believe that their life task is to outshoot and leave behind the parental success stories, and that such a task is fully within their capacity. However far their parents have reached, they will reach further. Nothing has prepared them for the arrival of the hard, uninviting and inhospitable new world of downgrading of results, devaluation of earned value, volatility of jobs and stubbornness of joblessness, transience of prospects and durability of defeats, stillborn projects and frustrated hopes and chances ever more conspicuous by their absence. The higher they looked, the more deceived and downtrodden they would feel.

The past few decades were times of unbound expansion of all and any forms of higher education and of an unstoppable rise in the size of student cohorts. A university degree promised plum jobs, prosperity and glory: a volume of rewards steadily rising to match the steadily expanding ranks of degree holders. That temptation was all but impossible to resist. Now, however, the throngs of the seduced are turning wholesale into the crowds of the frustrated.

A high-class diploma from a high-class university was for many years the best investment loving parents could make into their children's future. Or at least it was believed to be such. That belief is now being shattered. The labour market for holders of higher education credentials is currently shrinking – faster even than the market for those lacking university qualifications. Nowadays, it is not just people failing to make the right kind of effort and the right kind of sacrifice who find the gates being shut in their face; those who did everything they believed to be necessary for success are finding themselves in much the same predicament.

Social promotion through education, portrayed in glowing colours under the name of meritocracy, served for many decades as a fig leaf for naked inequality of human conditions and prospects: as long as academic achievements correlated with handsome social rewards, people who failed to climb up the social ladder had only themselves to blame – and only themselves on whom to unload bitterness and wrath.

The shock of the new and rapidly rising phenomenon of the graduate un- or under-employment, exploding the meritocratic dream, hits not just the zealously climbing minority but also a much wider category of people who previously suffered their unappetising lot. It is difficult to say which of the two category-specific blows can and will cause more social turmoil, but together they make an explosive mixture. Reading William Cohan's sombre warning published in the New York Times on 16 March 2011, you can imagine those at the top of our society starting to get nervous: "One lesson to be learned from the recent uprising in the Middle East, especially in Egypt, is that a long-suffering group of highly educated but underemployed people can be the catalyst for long overdue societal change."

Political scientist Louis Chauvel, in an article published in Le Monde, noted "anger, even hate" even among the rioting French college graduates of 2010. He asked how much time it will take to combine the rancour of the French contingent of baby-boomers infuriated by the threats to their pension nests, with that of the class of 2010, who were denied their right to earn pensions. But combine into what, we should ask? Into a new war of generations? Into a new leap in the pugnacity of extremist fringes surrounding increasingly despondent and dejected middle-class precariat? Or into a supra-generational consent that this world of ours, prominent as it is for using duplicity as its survival weapon and for burying hopes alive, is no longer sustainable and in (already criminally delayed) need of refurbishment?

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